eee
6mo ago
I think your thesis is is worthless because it is both wrong and vapid. Any LARP that doesn't amount to anything? Well they just weren't determined enough to do it longer. It is completely unfalsifiable in the same way as a conspiracy theory normally is. And it doesn't matter how determined and for how long the cargo cults worship John Frum--the cargo is not coming back and it hasn't turned into something more.
Though I think if I take the essence of the idea it can still be applied in some cases. I'm thinking more of the transformations of the norms of communities though. Take for example both Something Awful's forums and 4chan (years ago). Both were places where being edgy and transgressive through things like being as offensive as possible was the norm as a form of counter-culture of contrarianism. Then on SA some people started being meta-contrarian (contrarian to the prevailing board culture), but were probably not being really sincere. Then other people that were not in on the joke followed along and eventually it turned into the neo-puritan society complete with witchhunts that was completely ideologically opposed to the site that the forum is based off of and the entire rest of the forums. Then this spread to /r/srs and snowballed further and further and now the modal progressive on Bluesky would be absolutely horrified that the origins of their ideology was incubated on a site that made fun of JeffK.
4chan had a similar culture and was initially made up of Something Awful diaspora. However, instead of the contraposition becoming the dominate culture the racism-as-shibboleth attracted enough honest racists that were not in on the joke. Eventually, it became enough of a problem that they were quarantined to /pol/, but this obviously did not contain them. And in a very similar way you can still see the echoes of this in various parts of the online right, but I don't think they are particularly ashamed of it.
I recently watched a video of a guy making penicillin. Unless I'm really missing something I don't see how you could safely produce it at any sort of reasonable scale without countless advancements in in dozens of fields from glassmaking, chemistry, genetics, germ theory, etc. Even with the knowledge of the 1930s it took them two decades from discovery to use it effectively.
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